The Civic League for Regional Atlanta

The Civic League announces the release of Mapping the Path to Light Rail: What the Atlanta Region Can Learn from Light Rail Adopters by Tara Squitiro and John C. Thomas. One of the League's 2009-2010 research initiatives, this paper focuses on light rail or light rail transit, a type of public transportation that, as compared to heavy rail systems such as subways, moves fewer people at slower speeds but costs less to build and operate, making light rail a better fit for less densely populated regions, such as the Atlanta metropolitan area.

Based on an analysis of light rail transit across the U.S., this report profiles four cases of successful light rail adoption in metropolitan areas similar to the Atlanta region. The report concludes that, judging from these cases, light rail could be politically feasible and could be worth pursuing in the Atlanta Region, but proponents of light rail here would be well advised to heed the a number of lessons drawn from the experience of these other areas.